This book is aimed at programmers who want to learn Tcl/Tk because they find its advantages attractive. It is a self-teaching book with more than 200 solved exercises. All exercises run on both Windows and Unix versions of Tcl/Tk. Only a couple require code variations to accomplish this. The material in this book comes close to being platform independent.

Programmers and systems administrators with other interests may wish to learn from this book as well:

- Tcl/Tk is valuable to Unix systems administrators who want to provide their users with scripts accessible through a GUI front end. (The examples in this book do not illustrate systems administration topics because these tend to vary with the platform.)

- Tcl/Tk is valuable to C/C++ programmers who want to learn a high-level scripting language for their user interfaces or for integrating pieces of a large system.

Although this book is meant to be studied sequentially by someone who works on the exercises, it can serve the purpose of an "introductory manual" as well. The index is designed to send the reader to the main place for any given topic. At that place the reader will find cross references to other places.

The material is detailed but not inclusive. There has concern that descriptions not be so long or so detailed that few people would wish to study them and that descriptions not be so short that many people would need to go to another source before accomplishing anything useful.

This book is not a simple-minded introduction, not a comprehensive manual, and not a collection of production-quality scripts. It bridges the gaps between those things.

:) "This book goes through the details of how things work, in detail, with excellent "mini-quizes" that illustrate all the important concepts. If you program in another language and need to do work in Tcl, do yourself a favor, get this book and spend a weekend going through it first."

:) "If you are patient enough to go through all of the exercises, you will have a very strong and solid understanding of this fantastically elegant and programmer-friendly language."

:) "If you've done some programming and are comfortable with typical flow-of-control structures, expression syntax, and have done some shell programming on Unix platforms, you will quickly get a handle on Tcl with this book."

:( "The examples are trivial, and are too frequent to allow browsing - you keep having to break the flow in order to skip over these examples. Take away the examples, and you have very little book left."